Mao Would Have Loved Apple’s China Apology

By Adam Minter -
Apr 2, 2013

This morning, 17 days after China’s
state media began a campaign against what it characterized as
Apple’s Inc.’s discriminatory warranty and repair policies, and
12 hours after Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook apologized
for them, I stopped by the Apple store on Shanghai’s Huaihai
Road.

I’ve visited many times in the past, and it was as packed
as ever with passersby checking e-mail on iPads and clerks
running credit cards through readers. My efforts to strike up
conversations with customers at the Genius Bar regarding Cook’s
apology were met with indifferent shrugs and a couple of “it’s
not important to us” dismissals. Cook appears to have known
this already. “Close to 90% of our customers expressed
satisfaction with our repair services,” he wrote in his apology
letter. “And customer satisfaction is the most important metric
by which Apple measures its success.”

The problem for Cook and Apple is that customer-centricity
isn’t the only metric necessary to measure success in China.
Most successful companies in China -- whether large or small --
also need to demonstrate that they’re capable of government-centricity. That is, they need to be able to please the powers
with authority over them, or at least prove themselves so
inconsequential as to be not worthy of attention.

Unfortunately for Cook, it’s not up to Apple to decide
whether or not its efforts at pleasing Beijing have been
successful. That’s a metric judged by officials in Beijing, most
of whom have no relationship to Apple beyond the expensive
phones that many carry in their pockets. Among that influential
group are individuals capable of focusing China’s huge Communist
Party and state-owned media infrastructure onto a single
propaganda goal. Sometimes those goals are positive -- such as a
campaign in January to end food wastage -- and sometimes they
are quite negative, indeed, as Apple has learned over the last
two-and-a-half weeks of incessantly vicious coverage in state-and Party-owned newspapers.

What, precisely, could Apple have done to displease China’s
propaganda apparatus (or whoever controls it)? Speculation runs
rampant in the foreign media, with some suggesting that the
Chinese government has targeted Apple in retaliation for U.S.
government restrictions on Chinese technology companies. Others
figure that China is trying to clear the way for native
technology companies to capture Apple’s market share in China.
Curiously, few appear willing to believe that Chinese officials
might be so offended by Apple’s alleged use of refurbished parts
in the repair of Chinese iPhones (in contrast to consumers in
the U.S., who are simply given new phones), warranty periods
that are shorter than those offered in other countries, and
warranty policies that appear to violate Chinese law, that
they’d be willing to launch a propaganda campaign against the
company.

To be sure, it’s over the top, especially from an American
standpoint. But in China, where the perceived disrespect and
slights from foreigners are often viewed through the prism of
China’s colonial past, they have political force. Thus Apple, by
virtue of its size and foreignness, is at perpetual risk of
being viewed in terms totally at odds with how it likely sees
itself.

Consider, for example, the following tweet from Ran Xiang,
a well-known nationalist commentator with more than 680,000
followers on the Sina Weibo platform. Since Saturday, it’s been
reposted more than 1,500 times:

“China Central Television and People’s Daily are bombarding
Apple, arguing strongly for the rights of Chinese consumers, but
some people are feeling unhappy about it. This is a weird
phenomenon with Chinese characteristics, and it reminds me of
those who are raped or disrespected trying their best to plead
on behalf of the rapists. An obsequious mindset that suggests
Americans are superior to others is deep rooted in their hearts.
They are the Chinese who love America more than Americans and
they feel proud.”

If Apple isn’t oblivious to this kind of sentiment, it
certainly doesn’t feel much need to respond to it. But in
maintaining silence in the face of much milder accusations of
favoring American customers over Chinese, it runs the risk of
sparking slow-burning tempers -- especially those possessed by
government officials and Chinese netizens sympathetic to their
occasional patriotic excesses.

Notably, official and popular anger (albeit popular anger
that might very well have been ginned up) at Apple’s repair and
warranty policies had been brewing for months, with little to no
effort by Apple to quench it. In June 2012, for example, the
company was condemned by the China Consumers’ Association for
replacing damaged parts in iPhones with refurbished parts. In
July 2012, a state-sponsored Chinese consumer group added Apple
to its “integrity” blacklist for similar repair and warranty
issues. And in August 2012 China’s state-run media played up a
consumer lawsuit against the company for unequal repair and
warranty policies. Then the complaints went quiet for a while.

But anyone who has paid attention to China’s long history
of targeting foreign brands for alleged wrong-doing (all the
while allowing Chinese-owned companies to get away with similar
or worse) had to know that the campaign wasn’t over. In fact, it
was likely to be kicked up a gear on March 15, 2013, the date of
China Central Television’s annual “Consumer Rights Gala,” a
widely watched special during which foreign and Chinese
companies are singled out for their anti-consumer behavior. And
that’s precisely what happened: Apple’s warranty and repair
policies were featured offenders. Predictably, Apple remained
quiet in the wake of the accusations, and thus the campaign
against it began.

Much of the campaign has been draped in seriousness, with
an unerring focus on the allegedly discriminatory warranty and
repair policies that rankled officials in 2012. But there are
moments when the seriousness gives way to absurdity, such as a
March 21 “exclusive” by Xinhua, the state news agency, which
accused the company of luring 20,000 Chinese college students
into “usury,” according to the official English-language
translation. But the purest invective is found in the opinion
pages, where an article such as “Destroy Apple’s ‘Unparalleled’
Arrogance” is allowed to run in People’s Daily, the official
mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.

The excesses of this campaign have likely undercut its
effectiveness on the roughly 90 percent of Chinese whom Cook
claims were satisfied with Apple’s service. On Chinese social
media, the campaign has been roundly criticized and mocked, with
some prominent microbloggers going so far as to compare it to a
Cultural Revolution-era propaganda campaign. In one notable
case, a microblogger photoshopped an image of Steve Jobs, head
hung low, with a white placard around his neck, onto a classic
Cultural Revolution poster. The text on the placard reads “The
Obstinate Profiteer Jobs.” Below it, in the margins, the poster
declares: “Fight the People’s war well, criticizing and
denouncing Apple and Jobs.”

As satire goes, it’s chilling. As prophecy goes, it’s
accurate: Tim Cook, playing the part of the persecuted
profiteer, apologized on Monday. In doing so, he offered up
revised warranty and repair policies for China, in effect
conceding the truth of at least some of the accusations against
his company, while trying to bring an end to this sorry episode
in Apple’s otherwise illustrious recent history in China.

(Adam Minter, the Shanghai correspondent for the World View
blog, is writing “Junkyard Planet,” a book on the global
recycling industry. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the author of this article: Adam Minter at
ShanghaiScrap@gmail.com.